Netflix hires Reddit Chief Architect: Will outages end?

Updated. Netflix has made a hire that could help put an end to some of its recent outages: Former Reddit Chief Architect Jeremy Edberg announced via Twitter that he has joined the streaming company as its Lead Cloud Reliability Engineer. The move comes about a month after Edberg said he was leaving Reddit.

Edberg had been with Reddit for about four-and-a-half years, as the first hire of the then-young startup and helped grow its traffic from 1.3 million unique users and 40 million page views a month to 18.8 million uniques and 1.2 billion page views by this May. According to his updated LinkedIn profile , Edberg will be leading up a new cloud reliability team within Netflix.

The timing couldn’t be better, as Netflix suffered a long period of downtime Sunday evening that some say resulted in spotty availability for up to eight hours. It was just the latest in a series of outages that Netflix has suffered in recent months. The outage also came on the heels of an extremely unpopular change to the company’s price plans, which effectively raised the price of a combined streaming and DVD offering by 60 percent and left many subscribers outraged and threatening to quit.

That said, the move also comes about three months after Reddit suffered an outage due to a degradation of service that hit one of Amazon’s data centers in April. Those issues didn’t affect Netflix, which managed to stay up during the time of the outage. Reddit also went down a month earlier, in March, a problem it blamed in part on a performance issue with AWS’s Elastic Block Storage service — the same one that was at the root of the big AWS outage in April.